Here's what I did this week!

I started Summer Session B this week - trying to cram in my required courses so that there's not too much to think about when I start my student teaching in September. I am taking Youth Cultures, which sounded fun, and Education and the Aesthetic Experience, which sounded...impenetrable. Apparently, the title also confuses my professor - a crazy Italian phd student: we spent nearly the entire two-hour class period last night discussing the definitions of the words "education" and "experience." If we ever get through "and" and "aesthetic," I'll let you know what the class is about.

Youth Cultures might get fun once we slog through all the Piaget and other old-timey theorists of adolescence (of yore). Or it might remain boring. Even though we have, so far, had the great pleasure of watching both a Katy Perry music video and a clip of High School Musical in class, this class mostly blows it vast potential for awesomeness by serving as a forum for our mumbly old British professor's proofs that he is cool. He namechecks people like Joanna Newsom and talks a lot about Twilight (like, a lot. He even made us read a chapter for homework - much more painful than the theory reading.).

Like I said, I have faith this class will improve: our midterm is to write a one-page paper analyzing a tween show. For now, though, the most fun I've had was writing a "reaction" to our first set of assigned readings. We had about 200 pages to do for the first class (hello, dude - Summer Session!), including an article called "Nation of Wimps," which basically whined and moaned about how Boomer parents are all like this, except, you know, with children and not weimaraners. I have excerpted below because I think what I wrote is kind of funny and I'm really lazy:

And then we get to today’s youth: mollycoddled, weak, depressed, unable to grow up because parents won’t let them. Where is the dashing, roguish youth of our past? Where are there witticisms and their wild schemes? Why do we have to worry more about depression now than masturbation? And why do we keep teaching them in much the same way, even when parenting and childhood are “evolving” at alarming rates?

I put “evolving” in quotations because writer of “Nation of Wimps” seemed under the impression that these changes were RENDING THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY (dun dun dunnnnn). And, sure, I am as annoyed by those “but I’m a hip parent”-parents, or, worse, “but I’m still a kid”-parents, as anyone. And, yes, I do think kids have a much more skewed vision (and version) of reality than I did growing up. They do need to fail and fall down and feel sad every once in a while, but I think most will figure out how to do that eventually, no matter how much hothouse parenting they are subjected to.

It may take longer - stretching into that horrible thing called “extended adolescence,” which is really just “30 year-olds wearing cargo shorts and binge drinking instead of GETTING IT TOGETHER ALREADY BECAUSE OMG YOU ARE 30 AND MY PARENTS HAD 2 KIDS AND REAL JOBS BY THE TIME THEY WERE YOUR AGE.” (Like, does anyone else just flip out every time they see that Verizon commercial that starts out, “Today you went from dude to dad,” because I always yell at my TV that you should probably stop being a “dude” and start being a “responsible man” way before an actual, living, breathing thing pops out of your lover’s womb.) Anywayyyy, most kids, as I think the article pointed out, are aware of being over-parented and don’t like it, so we have to have faith that they will, sooner or later, rebel - i.e., figure out how to fail and grow on their own.

And if kids and childhood are forever changed - if they don’t entirely bounce back - well, maybe that’s okay too. Our society doesn’t attribute the same values to the same life skills as it once did. We still want to see assertiveness and leadership, but we are also in a decade of cooperation, groupthink and mash-up. When the article complains that children are more “herd-minded,” I think, well, why can’t we call it “hive-minded”? The ability to go with the flow and work as a team isn’t a weakness.

And then I go on and on about how it's probably okay that we're not raising, like, Warrior-Kings of Blood Vengeance because that's not really how the world works anymore. And my whole class probably thinks I'm a crazypants annoying person because I bashed out 3 pages on readings that none of the cool kids even did. I really wanted to write a disclaimer at the top to let them know I have a really long commute and forgot to bring anything else to do, but I thought that would probably make me sound even crazier.

The upside to cultivating a persona as "class crazyperson" is that I can yell at the professor about his lameness and probably also talk a lot about Adventure Time - because there is nothing crazier than that show. I'm thinking about writing my midterm about it, so you'll probably see my analysis up here when I once more get too lazy to post original writings.

Already terrible!

I made a resolution about 4 days ago to write in either this blog or my other (or, gasp, possibly both?!) every day for at least a week. The idea was that setting a strict schedule would build into some kind of routine and I would continue to write regularly even after the week had passed. Three days in, I failed.

The terrible part is that I don't even have a good reason - like school or work or hangovers - for why I didn't write yesterday. I am on my week-long break from school (between Summer A and Summer B), I don't have any freelance things due for another week and a half, and I'm pretty much just sleeping and reading the newspaper all the time. For the first few days of this, I was like, "Look, world, this is my vacation week. I have had a stressful summer, and I deserve not to worry about things for three freakin' days." But seriously, self, it's been long enough.

The above stress-inducers/time-suckers have made it really hard to write, well, kind of all year (with the exception of hangovers. I am now so boring and workyworky that I rarely drink more than one beer). My old, "real" job may have sucked, and I don't regret leaving it for school AT ALL, but man, it sure made weekends easier. I could just leave stuff on my desk and not think about it, or care, for days. Now, there is ALWAYS something looming over me: Freelance stuff has been coming in steadily (which is awesome - I didn't think I would get any work, really), I am working part-time in an actual office-y building, and, except for this week, I have homework to think about (even though it's summer, and we all know, deep in our hearts, that summer class is - or is supposed to be - a joke). Oh, and there's also the little matter of planning an entire semester's worth of English classes for the 9th graders that I'm getting this September.

Wahwahwah - right? I've gotta stop making excuses. I mean, I love writing - why do I not do it more? Why can't I make time for it, when I make plenty of time for pfutzing around on the Internet and talking to my dog? I've had an idea for a novel bouncing around my skull for at least a year, but aside from the general plot points, all I've scratched out is a character sketch for a dad with an ill-conceived and nefarious-looking mustache. Surely, I can do better.

Hey!

Hey! Know what's a mostly bad decision? Starting a blog and then NEVER writing in it! Like, EVER! I mean, look at that last entry: a field trip? Man, I ain't been on no stinking field trips in months!

But don't worry, I'm still doing stupid things - like moving out of my beloved Park Slope. Nay, not just Park Slope, but all of Brooklyn. In fact, I moved out of the entire state of NY - the Empire State! I fear for my head when the Emperor (Jay-Z the Beneficent) finds out.

Yes, I am now an official resident of New Jersey, if you count postal addresses as official residencies. I don’t know, I “officially” change my address at least once a year through usps.gov, and aside from charging me a dollar for “verification” costs (aka, "the USPS is broke, please give us money" costs), I don’t think they really do anything to check how official I am. So if I didn’t mind my Shape magazine subscriptions going to complete strangers, I could probably be a "verified" resident of anywhere. 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.? Done - I just hope the presidential daughters don't walk off with my mail-ordered camping sandals. (They're probably too cool for that.)

So, yeah - moving has apparently turned me into the kind of major, major nerd who wears Tevas in public - not like, base camp public, but suburban half-price sushi restaurant public. And I eat at suburban half-price sushi places located in NJ strip malls. AND I LIKE IT.

How did this happen?

Well, the half-price sushi happened because it's awesome and delicious. That's all you need to know there. The Tevas and granola-making and showing up to class as the smelly kid with a bike seat hanging out of her backpack? I think it's a semi-subconscious anti-NJ rebellion.

Don't get me wrong: there is nothing inherently bad about NJ. It smells much better than you might think, flora and fauna abound, and there is a real-live Target Superstore. Heaven, no?

But, you see, I am not of NJ. I did not grow up in a subdivision. I do not quite understand how the Turnpike works. I like walking places. Rude people stress me out. Thus, living in a big house in a neighborhood with a lot of other big houses that all look the same, where people are terrible drivers who honk at you for STOPPING AT RED LIGHTS! JEEZ! sometimes makes me want to hide in a damp cave until summer is over.

Damp caves, however, are bad for the skin and worse for relationships (coming in at a close second to NY Bar Review), and so I do the next best thing. I slowly convert to hippie-dom. I do yoga and stand around outside and buy giant tubs of organic yogurt (BaNilla flavored! So good! So funny!). Maybe if I drape enough daisy chains over my head, I can pretend I am in Vermont. Or Park Slope.

Autobiography part a million

A little secret about teacher school: you spend A LOT of time talking and thinking and writing and talking more about YOURSELF. Not about school or students or teaching - just you.

I have a "teaching autobiography" due tomorrow. I'm not entirely sure what that is. I read two articles that were about the importance of writing teaching autobiographies, but neither really bothered to go into the mechanics of one. From what I can gather, you pretty much just spill your guts about EVERYTHING that might affect how you teach - your background, beliefs, political leanings, earliest learning and teaching experiences, inspirations, anti-inspirations, ETC.

Because my poor computer is full to the point of lethargy these days, I have decided to write said autobiography here and allow the internets to worry about saving it. I think I am going to present it as a mobile, so if it looks a little piecey, just imagine it swirling around with lots of string and pretty paper. oooooh! right?

Where I'm coming from:
A Mainer who grew up in the South.
White, middle-class family that seriously values education.
Public school until high school. I loved school until 7th grade.
Middle school sucked. More on that later.
Then there was high school. I went to Brookstone School: A College Preparatory School for Boys and Girls. It was ridiculous - populated by the landed gentry of the south - but an incredible educational experience. It was small and challenging and the teachers there cared whether you learned something and whether you were happy doing it. My freshman year of college was EASY compared to my senior year of high school. We had no classroom management. No discipline - it just didn't seem necessary (until my junior year there was Brookstone Hunt Club that asked kids to bring their guns to school). We were given a lot of freedom and frequently were treated like responsible adults - kind of college-lite. Going there was probably the best thing, life-course-changing-wise, that has ever happened to me.
I'm a Liberal and a sociology major. I'm sure that sort of thing will affect my classroom approach.
I'm impatient but working on it.
Thanks to the Brookstone experience (and my parents), I grew up very sheltered. I realize this. The types of things that some of my kids will be going through will probably blow my little mind. We'll see.

Why am I here?
This one is messy.

Nieto writes that many excellent teachers are also activists. I have felt, for much of my life, like an activist without a cause. I wanted to do good, to impact the world for the better, but have never really found what felt like the right channel for me to do so. I've been a tutor, a Habitat for Humanity builder, a 4H member, a visitor to various old folks' homes, a camp counselor - and I liked all those things and thought that they were the right thing to do at the time, but they didn't feel like my LIFE. A once-a-week meeting, no matter how anticipated or successful, is not a CAUSE. It is just a step.
A step to what? Why did I do those things? I guess the greater impetus, and this is going to sound dumb, was to just BE GOOD - to make life a little bit better or easier or happier for those who could use the help. A lot of what I did happened to be (and happens to be) education-focused because that's what I'm good at - that's what I have to offer.

There are other reasons why I'm here. I cried every day on the way to middle school because I hated it and felt so alone and bored and just weird because that's how middle school makes you feel. Middle school should not be a purgatory - it's hard enough being thirteen. Kids that age need teachers - note baby-sitters - who care about them and push them and realize that they are in a weird life place. I think I can do that.

I love school. There is no place I'd rather be, and I want others to feel that way.

I want to be a TC in particular because it seems very aware of and invested in its community. I wanted - needed - to go somewhere that would adequately train me to teach where good teachers are most needed.

What I want to be
I have spent a ridiculous number of hours trying to plot my "Teacher Persona" for the classroom. Will I be tough? Kind? Funny? Scary? Crazy? Will I be able to control it at all? I don't know. But I do have some models.
My mom is a first grade teacher. She is kind and patient and very good at keeping a sense of humor.
I want to make myself as warm and inviting as Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz. She made those of us in her writing class last semester feel like we were her favorite, smartest, most special class ever. It was incredible and so encouraging.
I want to be sharp and well-traveled and a little bit kooky like Mrs. Khazaeli, my 9th grade English teacher. She told me to be a writer, and she had us all convinced that she could do witchcraft.
I want to have the energy of Mr. Davis, my history teacher, and Mr. East, another English teacher. It was impossible not to be excited in their classes.
I want to be as lovable and terrifying a the same time as Mrs. Livengood, my European history teacher. I think it would help to be 6 feet tall and built like a linebacker with flaming red hair. And be a genius. And have incredibly high expectations. And be like a mom (a gossipy one) to everyone.
And even before I knew I wanted to be a teacher, I knew I wanted to be like Kate Slevin, my college adviser. She was smart and funny and dry and no-nonsense, and she could have been so intimidating, but instead, she was the only college professor whose class I ever willfully spoke in. She had a way of drawing me out. I still don't know how she did it, but she helped me shine. I need to learn that trick.

I had a whole other section planned out for what I don't want to be, but I decided not to dwell on the negative because I certainly don't want to be that.

Moving forward
I start student teaching tomorrow. My billion questions are sure to multiple as soon as I get int o the classroom. For now, I'm just going to do my best, take lots of notes, listen to anyone who will take the time to talk to me (including students), and try to build a little bit more of myself as a teacher every day.

A whole new year in which to make bad decisions! Yay!

I definitely finished out the old year and jumped right into the new in the true spirit of this blog: I went to my parents' house and did not write a thing for close to a month.

A month! I don't even know if I know how to write anymore. What is this thing I am banging on with my fingers? A keyboard? What IS that?

Instead of writing, I ate. And ate and ate and ate meat and bread and banana pudding and candy and chicken salad and cheese, all topped off with beer, wine and eggnog. Bad decisions, to be sure. I think I gave myself gout. I definitely gave myself a stomachache, and, like a truly crazy person, refused to learn from my gourmet mistakes, instead making new ones every day.

Even on the ride home - a bad decision all on its own, for reasons I will describe shortly - I could not tame the eating beast that I had cultivated throughout my ill-deserved vacation. We ate at Sonic (bacon cheeseburger AND chocolate cream pie shake), then we ate at Wendy's, then we ate beef jerky and sour patch kids and Pepsi. And we didn't move for 20 hours.

Yes, twenty. Being the incredibly wise and forward-thinking people that we are, we (Gerard, the dog and I) decided about half-way through our trip that we were not going to stop in DC, as planned, but, instead, would drive all the way to New Jersey in one crazy road adventure.

This was stupid on two, maybe three, counts:
1) Not stopping in DC meant we would not get to see the lovely Alejandro, who I had just called the day before to drop the last-minute bomb that we would be invading his house. I had to call him back and even-more-last-minute cancel, probably ruining his plans for the evening and being an all-around terrible friend.

2) Twenty hours is long and exhausting for even the most well-rested and alert of drivers. We were not well-rested and alert. We had gone to a wine-tasting/ridiculous-fest with my family the night before and were driving on 6.5 hours of sleep and the slowly dissipating remnants of 6 glasses of wine in our bellies.

3) Snow happened. AGAIN. "The blizzard of '09" struck the night before I was supposed to ship out of New Jersey to get home, and even after having to shovel myself out of a driveway and make my first attempt at snow-driving alone, I did not learn to plan my travel around the weather. Just after passing DC (where we could have stopped!) on the drive home, the snow showers started up. We had to make he rest of the trip puttering along below the speed limit, unable to see more than a few feet in front of us.

We made it home (well, to NJ) at 3:45 AM.

We are now back in Brooklyn, where our new year will really get up and running. School starts back in a few days (Monday for Gerard, the next week for me), I go back to the admissions office tomorrow, I have faith that one day I will actually get assigned to teach a Kaplan class, and the great "stop Lauren from eating so much" experiment will begin. I feel that this year will give me much to write about, especially once I begin my student teaching in February. Stay tuned.

The dog ate my homework.

True Story.

And I let her because 1) I am a horrible dog-spoiler and 2) I am an AWESOME procrastinator. I know of no on else who could possibly take as long to write a one page paper as I have (4 hours and counting.) I've probably spent about 8 minutes actually writing - and filled at last a page, but I've spent a billion interspersed minutes reading blogs and taking pictures of the dog. Sig. School is hard.

First class

My first class starts in about 2.5 hours (not that I'm nervously counting down or anything). It's a big, mean, double-whammy of a class -- 4 hours long and really two classes combined -- "Teaching of Writing" and "Writing Non-fiction."

Teaching of writing I'm cool with. I need to know how to do that. Writing non-fiction I am less cool with. From what I can tell, it's a lot of writing about yourself and your feelings and attempting to make some sort of "breakthrough" as a writer. I'm not saying I don't need the help; if you are reading this you know very well that I could use about a billion classes on improving my writing.

The thing is, I don't really like feelings. I don't like to talk about mine, and I definitely don't like having to react and respond to other people's. I think I'm an empathetic person -- friends can come to me with their problems and feel pretty safe that I will try to see things their way -- but, between you and I, it's hard! I usually have no idea why people feel the way they do or act the way they act; they baffle me. A two hour feelings assault masquerading as a class sounds terrifying.

The worst part: even if I make it out of there without having offended anyone and having learned something, I am 98% sure that, when I start teaching, I still will not understand why middle schoolers act the way they do.